About Marvel Premiere #28

In its nearly decade-long run (1972- 1981), Marvel Premiere served as a proving ground for a host of new characters. Iron Fist, Woodgod, Caleb Hammer, and many others made first appearances in Marvel Premiere. Other characters, like the Falcon and Jack of Hearts were featured here in their first solo stories. And yes, Marvel Premiere was also the venue at which Alice Cooper made his first comic book appearance.

Marvel Premiere #28 is a classic monster comics lovers delight as it combined many of the Marvel Monsters into a super-team of sorts – Ghost Rider, Morbius, The Man-Thing and Werewolf by Night all had solo comic titles at the time and since team-ups were all the rage in super hero titles, it only made sense to capitalize on that with a monster team-up and Marvel Premiere was designed to test new concepts. The Legion of Monsters only made one appearance in Marvel Premiere and didn’t spin off into their own title.

in the early 1970s, Marvel had been publishing multiple black-and-white horror anthology monster comics in the magazine format under its Curtis Magazine imprint as a means of bypassing the Comic Code Authority but they had canceled most of those titles by 1975 to focus more on super hero, action and science fiction genres. Following the Marvel Premiere issue, Curtis launched a stand-alond magazine titled Legion of Monsters in an effort to consolidate all their classic monsters comics titles into one magazine. The new line up was more horror-based (Ghost Rider was out; Manphibian and the Living Mummy were in) but unfortunately only one issue was ever published.